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Encryption Would Not Have Protected Secret Federal Data, Says DHS
HughPickens.com writes: Sean Gallagher reports at Ars Technica that Dr. Andy Ozment, Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity in the Department of Homeland Security, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that in the case of the recent discovery of an intrusion that gave attackers access to sensitive data on millions of government employees and government contractors, encryption would "not have helped" because the attackers had gained valid user credentials to the systems that they attacked—likely through social engineering. Ozment added that because of the lack of multifactor authentication on these systems, the attackers would have been able to use those credentials at will to access systems from within and potentially even from outside the network. "If the adversary has the credentials of a user on the network, they can access data even if it's encrypted just as the users on the network have to access data," said Ozment. "That did occur in this case. Encryption in this instance would not have protected this data."
The fact that Social Security numbers of millions of current and former federal employees were not encrypted was one of few new details emerged about the data breach and House Oversight member Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) was the one who pulled the SSN encryption answer from the teeth of the panel where others failed. "This is one of those hearings where I think that I will know less coming out of the hearing than I did when I walked in because of the obfuscation and the dancing around we are all doing here. As a matter of fact, I wish that you were as strenuous and hardworking at keeping information out of the hands of hackers as you are in keeping information out of the hands of Congress and federal employees. It's ironic. You are doing a great job stonewalling us, but hackers, not so much."
The fact that Social Security numbers of millions of current and former federal employees were not encrypted was one of few new details emerged about the data breach and House Oversight member Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) was the one who pulled the SSN encryption answer from the teeth of the panel where others failed. "This is one of those hearings where I think that I will know less coming out of the hearing than I did when I walked in because of the obfuscation and the dancing around we are all doing here. As a matter of fact, I wish that you were as strenuous and hardworking at keeping information out of the hands of hackers as you are in keeping information out of the hands of Congress and federal employees. It's ironic. You are doing a great job stonewalling us, but hackers, not so much."
The head of OPM also claimed in recent House hearings that their failure to close these systems down was justified since the hackers were already in the system when the recommendation was made.
In other words, we didn’t do anything to make the system secure, and when hackers broke in it was further justification for not doing anything.
Yeah, let’s put our healthcare under their control also!
Total and complete incompetence from the Obama administration where the only qualification that matters is political loyalty.
From the article:
"A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports."
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
It doesn't matter how many factors of authentication are used to obtain those credentials...
One past known attack was to obtain the users credential file. Works against AD just as well as against Kerberos (they are the same).
The one protection that kerberos had was that to use such credentials you had to be on the machine that they were given to. But since so many sites are now using NAT (which makes this useless), the stolen credentials can be used from anywhere for as long as the credentials have lifetime.
One thing the DoD did was mandate that the kerberos credentials granted received different lifetimes based on the network the request came from. As short as 15 minutes (least trusted) up to 7 days (with renewal every 10 hours) when the machine making the request was in a trusted network.
Worked fairly well at flushing out violations of policy.
The Feds always look for the most expensive option. They'll end up with pricey battery powered hardware tokens when they could look at cheap Yubikeys.
Every employee of the US government already has two-factor authentication in the form of a smart card. The problem is that there are many programs that don't have the hooks for two-factor authentication built in.
For example, a web app that queries Active Directory almost always asks for username and password, when Windows Authentication can use either username/password or smart card/PIN. This is because smart card/PIN requires trusted code to run on the client computer, and we all know that isn't really possible.
My family is visiting D.C. this summer, and in order to take a tour of a government facility (Capitol Hill, Congress, Dept. of Engraving, etc.) you need to apply through your congressional representative's office.
The "official and only" way to apply for a tour is to fill in and return, by email, unencrypted, a non-protected Excel spreadsheet with full names, SSNs, and other personally-identifiable information for your entire tour group (family) in one page of the spreadsheet.
Basically, if you want a tour, you must be willing first to roll over and put your goods out for anyone to sniff. No exceptions.
I was sick to my stomach over the idiocy of it all.
Two-factor authentication only means that in order to access the system you need two components, for example a Debit card and PIN, it doesn't necessarily limit access if you have those two components.
Other parts of the government already use more appropriate forms of two-factor authentication, generally smartcard badge+password, pin+rolling RSA key, or in some cases pin+password+rolling RSA key (not really more secure, and easier to forget pin+password). The badges and RSA keys have to be issued by the agency (and sometimes department) and synchronized-- I have a bag full of them from various agencies and aerospace companies and they're hard to keep track of. The badges are issued as a result of the whole background check process that was compromised and contain a hash of your fingerprints as well (some, though very few, computers have fingerprint readers). If they had implemented any of those, it's likely that the breach wouldn't have occurred. If, as you suggest, they had included access limits or almost any kind of access log checking, they could likely have detected and stopped a breach that was traceable to a forged/stolen credential as well.